The Geek Talk

Who is Mark Otto?

I am a 23-year-old user interface designer living in the San Francisco Bay Area, but originally from Wisconsin. Prior to working at Twitter, I worked as a design consultant in the south bay area at a lovely design and product team called ZURB.

Do you have a personal brand?

Not much of one, no. If I do it’s more of a personality than an actual brand. I don’t have a logo, business name, or alternate identity for myself; I’m pretty carefree about that kind of stuff. Overall I just want to make awesome stuff with people and have fun doing it.

How do you find design inspiration and colours for a new project?

Lately a lot of my inspiration comes from Dribbble and seeing what my coworkers are working on, especially the developers. There is a heavy emphasis on cross-pollenation of ideas at Twitter and because there are so many people and teams, there is always something new to work on.

The other tool I use is web design galleries like siteInspire and Drawar. I have them in my RSS reader and check them nearly ever morning. I take screenshots with LittleSnapper of the ones I like and upload them in an Inspiration set on Flickr for archiving. Whenever I’m looking for something I’ll head there and see what strikes me.

What does your typical day look like?

I usually get into the office around 8am or 9am following a 45 minute Caltrain commute into San Francisco. I get started with breakfast with coworkers to catch up with people and start to get the brain churning. Then I dive right into whatever projects I’m working on.

What do you do in your free time?

I spend time with my girlfriend of six years, play video games, take photos, and cook.

Current favorite apps?

More and more I’m finding really awesome apps to help serve a clear and concise goal in my workflow; those are the apps I like most. They include CloudApp for quick sharing of links and images, Taskpaper for quickly jotting down lists of todos each morning, and OmniGraffle for wireframing and designing quick ideas.

What OS do you prefer?

OS X (10.6.4) of course! I spent most of my life on the Windows side of the fence, but after a disastrous experience with an Alienware laptop and the arrival of the first Intel MacBook Pro, I made the switch. I’ve never looked back and love the speed, simplicity, and elegance of OS X and the hardware that runs it.

Small picture of your workplace?

Certainly! My workstation is a 15″ 2.53GHz MBP with 8GB memory, a 30″ Apple Cinema Display, USB Apple keyboard (wireless is too small), Magic Mouse, Griffin Elevator, and some old sony headphones.

If you want to see some pictures of the rest of the Twitter office, check out our company Flickr account.

Favorite: Color, Font, Language, JS Framework?

Playing favorites is easy: any shade of blue, Helvetica Neue (especially the Light weight), CSS, and jQuery. Blues have always stood out to me, especially faded or vintaged hues. Helvetica Neue is a solid and versatile font—one that many say is overused, but I still love it. CSS is my favorite thing to work with as a front-end developer and jQuery helps me get key interactions along when prototyping projects.

Name something that has inspired you recently?

Summer sunsets. Last week I spent a good amount of time on a new project about some summer-time events and the colors of the sunset (dark blues to burning oranges and yellows) really struck my fancy. Combined with some neon colors and a bit of texture, the idea came out pretty well I think.

What do you prefer (and why)? Freelance work or full time employment?

I’ve never really enjoyed freelancing, but I did do it for nearly five years during high school and college. Working in-house as a designer lets you more easily become consumed by the culture and that makes all the difference. Freelance comes with a good amount of baggage as well, nearly all of which is avoidable by full-time.

What are your personal projects and goals for 2010?

I’m working on a few side projects for personal use, but nothing too serious at this point. For 2010, I’d love to start a photoblog (we just got a Canon Rebel T2i and love it!) and get back to blogging. It’s been over six months since I last wrote something and definitely want to get into sharing the knowledge I’ve picked up since then. The problem is I’m having way too much fun at Twitter and there is never a shortage of work to be done, so I hope to just keep rocking that :).